I was wondering if anyone knows if Linux currently supports the Ultra DMAhard drives. I recently bought a SAMSUNG 3.4 GB Ultra DMA hard drive and Icreated 3 partitions using DOS FDISK, formatted all of them and everythingwas perfect. No errors, no bad sectors.

The first partition I left it for DOS, the second partition I made it"linux swap" (about 32MB) and the third one "linux native". I installed slackware 3.3 and at some point I got a lot of error messages like"Address mark not found", "Uncorrectable error"... etc. Very weird.I went back to DOS and tried to format that particular partition withFORMAT and this time I got about 8K in bad sectors.

Since I figured out that probably it was a bad hard drive (not likelythough because at the first format I got no errors) I took it back andexchanged it with another one of the same type. I repeated the sameprocedure and especially formated it first using DOS and ran SCANDISK withsurface scan and got no errors, then I tried installing linux one moretime and at the point when it was trying to make the swap partition with"mkswap" i got the same error messages. I went back to DOS once again toformat the partition and I got about 6K of bad sectors again.

Can anyone explain this thing to me ? Could it be possible that linuxwould damage the dard drive ?!

On the DOS partition I installed Win95 and everything was ok... Ichecked it and there were no errors. The bad sectors always appeared onthe linux partitions!

All though it is possible that the second hard drive to be bad as well,it is very less likely since first time when formatted and checked withSCANDISK no errors were reported.

I don't have the slightest idea what is going on or what to do. If anyone could give me an advice or an explanation I would reallyappreciate that. (Oh, forgot to mention that the motherboard has an Intel430TX chipset that supports the UDMA hard drives, so the problem could notcome from the motherboard). The computer is an Intel Pentium 233MMX with32 MB SDRAM if that helps.